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Wednesday, October 14, 2009

DIY Montessori Materials

I have been so inspired recently by bloggers making their own Montessori materials. There have been some amazing posts lately written by people who actually have had success (unlike myself) and have shared pictures and sometimes instructions and/or tips. I thought it might be nice if there was a place where people could post a link to their at-home experiments.

I have added a new section to my right-hand sidebar titled: DIY Montessori Materials. In that section I have listed four of the five Montessori "subjects": Language, Math, Sensorial, and Culture. I left out Practical Life because I think nearly all practical life works are homemade by nature. If you click on the links they will take you a MckLinky list where you can add a link to any posts you have written in the past or write in the future about making your own materials. The idea is that you can click on "sensorial" and see a list of DIYsensorial projects that others have attempted. You might someday find three different approaches to making your own red rods for example.

I didn't know any other way to do this other than to create a blog post for each of the subjects. I back-dated them so that they would be buried out-of-the way in the depths of my blog. They may show up in your reader, sorry about that. I also added my own posts so that the lists wouldn't all be completely empty at the start.

As I see new DIY posts crop up on other blogs I may add them myself to keep track of them, so don't be surprised if you find yourself already there at some point! I tried it out, and you are able to add multiple projects to the same Mcklinky. They do need to each have their own unique "address." What that means is that if you write one post about two different projects you won't be able to add the post twice with different names.

Instructions for how to title your post are at the lists. If you can find a way to link back so that people can return to see other projects on the list that would be great. You could use the "Ultimate Montessori Homemade Materials Collaboration" button below that Walk Beside Me created for me and have it link back here.

I just added a couple from someone else's blog too. She doesn't blog anymore - at least not about Montessori - but she had some really unique ideas for making her own materials. She even made her own geometric cabinet out of posterboard, foam core and little knobs.

The places to make the links aren't in this post they are in different posts. Go to the right-hand column of my blog, scroll down to the part that is labelled "DIY Montessori Materials." Choose the subject you want to add a link to: sensorial, language, math, or culture. That will take you to a post that has a MckLinky at the bottom of the post. You would click on "You are next...CLICK HERE to enter your link." "You are next" is in red. That will take you to a page where you give your link a title in the first box, something like "sandpaper letters - Koko's blog." And in the second box you put the web address of the your post.

If you have posts in more than one subject area you will have to do this for each subject area separately. You would have to go back to the right-hand column of my blog to find the link to the MckLinky again by subject.

It sounds like you've already done this, but you could then also add a sentence to the end of your own DIY post at your blog like "click here to go back to the Ultimate Homemade Montessori Collaboration List" and make part of that sentence a link back. (That's what Evenspor calls it and I like it). I haven't made a button yet or anything. I probably should.

I hope this helps, I'm new at this type of thing so I'm figuring it out as I go.

If you are looking for a way to collect info on DIY Montessori materials, I'd love it if you would check out the Montessori wiki I'm building. (montessorialbum.com) There will be a page for every lesson and a place at the bottom of each for instructions on how to make your own material. I'd also love it if anyone would like to help with filling in lesson instructions, or if anyone has any feedback for me in general. The page is still kind of ugly, but I'm working on it.

Hi MBT! I need your help here. I'm organizing my blog buttons and adding the corresponding links to it. How would you categorize the Handmade Collaboration? I'm afraid this isn't a Blog Carnival, is it? How would you label it?THANKS A LOT!

I thought I'd posted a comment a while ago, but knowing me, I left out the word verification or something ;)

I would suggest adding two more areas: geography and biology.

Geography: I'm thinking more specifically of elementary geography, which includes economic geography, physical geography, AND all sciences except life science (so astronomy, geology, physics, etc). So maybe call it "elementary geography" so the primary stuff stays where it belongs in sensorial and language.

Then biology includes botany and zoology.

These are two key elementary areas - and we need more elementary know-how on the web! :)

People have been posting their geography, botany and zoology in the "culture" category of the collaboration. Did you get a chance to take a peek at that one? There is a lot there.

I hadn't thought about separating primary from elementary before. You're right, language and sensorial will wind up being almost exclusively primary. It is only in the culture areas where we will really get contributions from both. I'll have to think about it though. I don't want people to miss out on good materials because they get lost in the crossover. For example, there are a lot of pin maps posted. Is that primary or elementary?